Azteca America is relying on Telestream’s FlipFactory and Launch to provide delivery of news content between the network’s California-based operations center and affiliate stations around the United States.

Azteca America is a fast-growing Hispanic network in the United States, providing programming to 60 affiliates in major Hispanic markets across the country. Azteca America supplies Spanish-language programming to its affiliate stations. In 2006, the owner of an affiliate asked Azteca America to produce local news stories for some of the affiliates in Texas and Nevada. Azteca America already had the production facilities but needed a way to move content quickly and efficiently between locations for newsgathering as well as for news delivery back to the local stations.

Local reporters now capture and edit news stories on laptop computer systems outfitted with a wireless card, Avid editing software and Telestream’s Launch software. News stories are dragged to a Launch folder, which automatically transcodes the content to VC-1 at 2Mb/s and transmits the media via the Internet to a FlipFactory server at the network operations center. A two-minute story takes about 10 to 12 minutes to send to the broadcast server ready for air.

FlipFactory is the glue between the outside world and the inside world at Azteca America’s network operations center. Everything that is delivered to the station via the Internet automatically goes through FlipFactory.

FlipFactory also is used to deliver material from the network operations center. Once local news stories are produced, FlipFactory encodes and delivers material back to the affiliates, ready to air. Higher-speed Internet lines are used for delivery back to the affiliates to avoid bottlenecks. A 22-minute program encoded in MPEG-2 format at 5Mb/s is delivered in 16 minutes.